DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.4| HAMMETT: WHAT FUTURE FOR QUEER COWS?_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 24 By the same logic, I would argue that this definition of queerness is also broad enough to include Hol­stein cows. If being fat is to flout normative standards of beauty and health then being a Holstein cow is to flout characteristics associated with the“natural,” such as purity, wildness, and beauty. Holstein cows do not live easy lives, they are separated from their children, often have diseases, have short lives and are killed once they outlive their usefulness. In the next section, I will develop the notion of queer cows by examining disciplines such as Science and Techno­logy Studies that see animals as actors and Queer Ecology that extends the notion of queerness to an­imals and the environment. Queering the Human and More-than-Human In my research on cows, I examine how they figure in narratives of climate change, particularly as distur­bances. Cows do not fit neatly into the category of nature, nor that of culture; they straddle binaries and become disturbing. They are not seen as natural be­cause of their breeding and domestication, and they do not fully belong to culture because they are not hu­mans. As animals who are bound up with technologies, they are queer creatures and are seen as a threat to “wild” animals because the land they inhabit is often lacking in biodiversity. In climate change debates, cows have become much maligned creatures for their production of methane, which is the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sec­tor. Such debates, by zeroing in on cows, often neglect to properly examine the global agrifood system and intensive farming systems that have contributed to many of the issues that we are now facing. Within the dairy sector, the solution to reducing emissions is seen as quantification, control, and productivity. The discipline of STS has grown from a desire to pursue a different take, especially in relation to the conducting of scientific practices. A central theme within STS is the questioning of dichotomies such as subject/object, nature/society, and another is working to overcome certain disciplinary distincti­ons to foster multidisciplinary collaboration. 17 Bruno Latour once proclaimed that humans“have never been modern” 18 . Modernity is a concept rife with tropes about the ingenuity of“man” and the prima­cy of humankind. In disavowing modernity, Latour has sought to challenge these assumptions and in so doing make space for objects, animals and all that is not human, as they had previously been neg­lected and marginalized. 19 Building on these foun­dations, Donna Haraway has gone on to declare that not only have we never been modern but that in fact, we have never been human, leading the way for a posthuman approach. 20 There have been numerous attempts to extend queer theory to nonhumans. Noreen Giffney has drawn at­tention to the ambiguity of the term“human” and believes it to be“both a discursive and ideological construct which materially impacts on all those who are interpellated through that sign, especially tho­se who find themselves on its margins or those who transgress its boundaries” 21 . Giffney asks“whether the act of queering is always already a posthuman endeavour” and wonders what implications such a premise could have for queer theory. One discipline in which queer theory and the more­than-human have converged is queer ecology. Queer ecology is interested in commonalities between queer and ecological concerns, and interrogates no­tions such as health, purity, and toxicity that appear 17 See Andrew Pickering(ed.), Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago, 1992). 18 Bruno, Latour, We Have Never Been Modern , trans. Catherine Porter(Cambridge, MA, 1993). 19 See ibid. 20 See Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis and London, 2008). 21 Noreen Giffney,“Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human”, in Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird(eds.), Queering the Non/Human (London and New York, 2016), 83–106 at 55.